Parent groups are hosting fairs that showcase phones with limited features to try and keep children away from smartphones
Parent-led 'Alternative Device Fairs' that showcase phones with limited features designed to protect children from the negative effects of smartphones and social media have been emerging in across the U.S. These devices often include advanced parental controls and AI filters to reduce exposure to harmful content while still allowing basic communication. The fairs also help to foster collaboration among parents and help them push back against the cultural norm that every child must have a smartphone by middle school.
Parent groups across the U.S. are hosting fairs to showcase "alternative devices" to keep children from owning smartphones for as long as possible.
The fairs, where 'dumb' or restricted phones are exhibited to parents, have been popping up in affluent areas around the U.S., according to a report from The Atlantic.
Most of the phones showcased at the event are basic and lack smart features like access to social media. Some are even fitted with AI-powered content filters, surveillance features, or parental controls.
These "dumb" phones have been rising in popularity among adults trying to wean themselves off an overreliance on smartphones and parents trying to keep their kids from developing one.
One school in the UK, Eton College, has implemented an official policy requiring new students to use basic phones for communication.
The market for these kinds of phones is also growing rapidly, with revenue from the dumb phone market expected to hit $10.1 billion in 2025.
The rise of alternative devices has been driven in part by growing concerns about the effects of smartphones and social media on children's mental health.
Last year, Jonathan Haidt's bestseller The Anxious Generation argued that the smartphone era had triggered a sharp rise in anxiety, depression, and social withdrawal.
The book's popularity ignited a fierce debate and triggered many parents to reconsider how and when children should engage with technology.
The fairs also serve as community spaces, allowing parents to collaborate and challenge the cultural expectation that every child must have a smartphone by middle school.
Haidt advocates for this kind of community action in the book. He argues that individual efforts by parents are often ineffective because of strong social pressures.
For example, parents don't want their children to be excluded because they are the only ones without phones or social media. Haidt suggests several schemes, including phone-free schools and coordinated action with parents agreeing to delay smartphone ownership or social media use until age 16 or later.
A few of these groups have emerged virtually over the year.
In the UK, a group called the Smartphone Free Childhood has about 200,000 members. The group helps parents collaborate to keep smartphones out of children's hands for as long as possible, typically connecting parents at the same school to ensure phone-less kids aren't left isolated.
In the US, a group called IRL NY (In Real Life New York), a parent-led organization, has also been pushing to keep smartphones out of kids' hands. Their mission centers on encouraging families to delay smartphone use and social media access for kids, advocating instead for safer, more focused alternatives.
One of their key initiatives is the "Alternative Devices" program, which highlights kid-friendly phones and watches designed to minimize distractions and enhance safety. These devices typically allow for calling and texting without the full range of smartphone features.
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
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Means, a Stanford-trained physician and wellness influencer, is also the co-author of Good Energy, a bestselling book that bills itself as 'the simple answer to achieving incredible health,' which she wrote with her brother, Calley Means, a former lobbyist and current White House adviser on health policy. The book operates on the claim that every chronic disease stems from metabolic dysfunction, or 'bad energy,' and the American health care system, which Calley Means calls a 'sick-care system,' is profiting from treating the symptoms. 'You are the primary person in charge of understanding your body,' Casey Means says on her website. 'You may have been indoctrinated to think you're not capable of understanding your body or your lab tests, but this stops here.' That philosophy — and the philosophy undergirding health tracking in general — fits into MAHA's ethos — that good health is your personal responsibility and can be engineered by doing all the right things. 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I tested several glucose-monitoring apps — including Levels, Lingo, Oura — over the course of a few months, and the negative effects of watching my blood sugar levels were almost immediately obvious to me. Within a week of wearing a glucose monitor, I started to notice some borderline disordered behavior. The Levels app sent me push alerts when my blood sugar spiked, which happened about five times a day, and each notification felt like a zap of anxiety. My morning bowl of cereal sent my blood glucose off the charts. My tuna sandwich at lunch did it again. A beer at happy hour? Forget it, the app made me think I was dying. So I started eating weird. I'd shovel nuts into my mouth before breakfast, skip lunch to avoid stressful push alerts, and once I ate a mixing bowl full of romaine lettuce to feel better about a single slice of pizza. My wife drew the line when I started taking pictures of my meals, so that some app's AI could analyze the nutrients in them. Glucose spikes after a meal are extremely normal. This is your body converting food into energy, or sugar, and then releasing insulin to instruct your cells to consume that energy. Over time, a pattern of large, prolonged spikes can lower your insulin resistance and raise your risk for Type 2 diabetes and heart disease. Some research indicates that continuous glucose monitors could be a helpful tool for the early detection of prediabetes in high risk patients, but again, there is little evidence that healthy people benefit from using the technology. At a certain point, I wasn't thinking about my long-term health or sanity. I definitely wasn't thinking about the future of the American health care system. I was just trying to get a good score in the app and reduce the number of anxiety zaps. I spend a lot of time thinking about how technology makes our lives better — and worse. I've wondered the same about the American health care system, as I've gotten older and more involved in the health care decisions of my parents, kids, and myself. It's not a great comparison. After all, there is no Hippocratic oath for tech companies. In the six months I spent hooked up to every health tracker I could find, feeding my morbid curiosity, I drove myself slightly crazy. Each hit of dopamine I enjoyed by getting good scores on a health-tracking app was offset by long periods of self-doubt that came from not fully understanding how to make sense of the torrent of data without my doctor's help. I also became obsessive — checking the apps was the first thing I did in the morning and started occupying hours of my day. That's the contradiction embedded in this cutting-edge technology: It can often lead to panic rather than peace of mind. 'There's something called orthorexia, where being perfectionistically healthy can just take over your life,' Gallagher, the NYU psychologist, explained. 'You can get really rigid, maybe with what you eat and how you do things, when we typically find rigidity is not sustainable for most people.' That's the contradiction embedded in this cutting-edge technology: It can often lead to panic rather than peace of mind. I decided to take off my last biosensor as spring was turning to summer and felt a weight lifted. I put away the Whoop band, which is explicitly designed to be worn 24/7, so much so that the newest model comes with a wearable charger so that you don't have to take it off. The only thing that I kept wearing was the Oura ring when I slept. As a tired young parent, getting to see a breakdown of my sleep data somehow made me feel more in control. There was, it appeared, the right amount of data to make me feel better. But what if, instead of too much data about my body, I had almost nothing. That's the case for many people in the United States. If you're lucky enough to have regular access to health care — over 100 million Americans do not — you might get one annual visit with a primary care doctor. That might include one check of your vitals, including your blood pressure and resting heart rate. Basic bloodwork would tell me about my blood sugar and cholesterol. Your doctor might prescribe medication, like a statin, if those numbers are out of whack. This is an optimistic estimate of what health care currently looks like in America, where primary care is in crisis and many patients feel lucky to get 15 minutes of face time once a year or pay high prices to see someone right away at an urgent care center. This must be a factor in the rising popularity of wearables, such as the Oura ring and Apple Watch, as well as new health-tracking services, like Levels and Lingo. That and the simple fact that Americans love independence and immediacy. Perhaps in the absence of available professional medical advice and guidance, we're turning to these gadgets for quick and constant reassurance. Combined with googling symptoms or closely following wellness influencers, it almost feels like we're better off taking our health into our own hands. But health tracking in its current form is not a science or even an art. It's certainly not the near future of the American health care system, as some MAHA followers might make you believe. Health tracking, at its core, is a self-driven experiment in better living for those who can afford these products and have the time to spare to comb through their own data. In some ways, it's just an expensive hobby. Like running or perfecting your smoothie recipes, it can be good for you. Wearing a smart ring or a glucose monitor alone won't make you feel better.
